War Stories
by polar-realm
Summary: Uhura and Chapel, scars and healing.


Everyone on this ship has scars.

Christine has seen them, patched them up – old school stitching sometimes, when there were no other options, or first aid tools cobbled together from whatever happens to be at hand. Or beneath the bright clarity of sickbay's lights, surrounded by stainless steel and the sterile gleam of modern technology, tracing a dermal regenerator along the lines of another crew member's body until the damage fades into invisibility. There – where the blade of a bat'leth had cut to bone – lies only smooth unblemished skin. There, a disruptor burn or a network of contusions, there a fracture. All vanished now, untraceable, but she remembers.

She tried to calculate, once, how long it's been since she has known how to look at a person and not see lines of stress and force and resilience, all the ways that a body can be – has been – broken and repaired. She couldn't. And she doesn't want to think that way, to see old friends and crewmates as nothing but bodies, potential casualties, but she does. Not always, not even often, but often enough.

Christine can put together a serviceable medkit from any of a dozen technology levels, if she has to, can clean a laceration or set a bone by hand. She's used to planning for the worst, and seeing it happen. She's good with damage control. What she can't do is keep her crew whole and free from harm, or stop the inevitable. And now, with one more mission behind them and Lieutenant Uhura – _Nyota_, she thinks, _Nyota_, but there's no thinking like that on duty – laid up in sickbay, all disruptor burns and lacerations, the inevitable has never seemed so close.

_Nothing bad_, she thinks, checking the scans, _everything stable, nothing that can't be healed_. She doesn't want to think about how easily it could have gone different. So she doesn't – not now. She's a nurse, and nurses prioritize; there's no fear until she has time for it, and on duty she never does.

* * *

Uhura wonders sometimes what it means to erase the damage so completely.

It's three years into the mission and she's seen her share of combat already, planetside and out among the stars. Her chosen weapons are words and codes, signals encrypted and received, but she knows enough by now to know that you can't always fight with the weapons you choose. And she still remembers all of it: the echoes of old battles, explosions like thunder beneath her feet, the grip of a phaser sweat-slick in her hand. Blood on her, and not all of it hers.

No, there's no forgetting that. It's settled in her like old fragments of broken bone beneath the skin, healed over but never gone. She shuts her eyes, feels the smooth contours of the biobed pressed against her back as Christine's steady hands mend another injury, and she's drifting under anesthesia beneath bright lights, thinking how very easy it would be right now to let herself just slip away. She's still got the stink of smoke and ozone clinging to her clothing, and she's coasting on the remnants of an adrenaline high and the raw, jagged edge of a fear that refuses to dissipate, and whenever she closes her eyes, she still sees people dying.

They had almost lost that one, back down there, that ambush. They had almost –

"Hush," Christine murmurs, though she hadn't spoken. "It's all right now, you're safe here. You're safe."

Her voice is rhythmic, rising in a lullaby cadence, and the words are strange to Uhura's ears. Her mind is elsewhere, skimming the surface of thought, and there's something important there that she can't quite capture, some elusive counterpoint hidden in the space between sound and meaning.

Scars are stories, or no, that isn't it. Not really. Scars tell stories, but scars are not stories. The stories run deeper, carved beneath flesh, written in blood, in untranslatable alphabet. Not always the kind you want told. But there are other stories too. Christine winding a clean bandage tight around her arm, tying it off while she grits her teeth in pain, or tending to the captain's injuries while she provides cover fire. Christine with gentle hands and tight smile, all business, unfazeable. No forgetting that either.

And there will be talk tonight over cards and whiskey, crude jokes, old stories, all bravado and impossible odds. The sum and whole of all they've been and done, all they've survived. And the other side, too, the silences that words don't fill, and right now, she doesn't know whether presence or absence pulls her stronger. She blinks against bright lights, and holds up a hand to still Christine's work with the regenerator, pushes herself up in the biobed and smiles like she knows what she's doing.

"Thanks," she says, "I think I'm good now."

Christine shakes her head, smiling almost sadly, touches gloved fingers to newly healed skin.

"If you don't get this taken care of now, you know, it's going to leave a scar."

Uhura nods, says, "I know."

* * *

And Christine watches her go, the shape of her receding into light through the sickbay doors, and realizes that she can't look at her friend and think of her as anything but _alive_.

What surprises her most is how much that scares her. How much of a relief it is, to finally feel that fear. To see Nyota alive anyway, in spite of it, safe and healed and not unchanged. There's something to be said for uncertainty, she supposes, in the end – the inevitable pushed back one more day.

Maybe she'll make her way down to Engineering when she gets off shift, join the celebration. There would be room for her there, she knows. She wouldn't be invading anything. She imagines warm red light, the sweltering heat from the engines, Scotty's moonshine and Gaila's sly, ribald humor. And she thinks about a world far removed from her own florescent demesne, slipping into the spaces there and finding herself welcome, and what it might feel like not to be in charge of anything for a while.

Maybe she'll go. Maybe she'll tell a few stories of her own.


End file.
